


Holding Onto Something

by TimeLoopedPowerGamer



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Canon Compliant, Character Death, Female Protagonist, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Military Jargon, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-16 09:13:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19315141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TimeLoopedPowerGamer/pseuds/TimeLoopedPowerGamer
Summary: SPOILERS FOR ALL OFNGEANDEnd of Evangelion.Asuka loses to the nine mass production Eva sent against NERV and dies horribly. Then she finds herself back on a carrier in the Pacific with Unit-02. When she dies, she ends up repeating events over and over again.





	1. Some say the world will end in fire

**Holding onto Something  
** _by TimeLoopedPowerGamer_

Disclaimer: NGE doesn’t belong to me.

* * *

Asuka continued to scream and scream, her voice breaking, her body bowed painfully, remaining hand clutched at her eviscerated stomach. She couldn’t see out of her ruined left eye and her right arm lay split-

It was fine. She could see her right arm with both eyes. It was fine. Her clawed left hand hovered over an undamaged body. Traitorous production model evas, a dangerously high sync ratio, and total internal reflection hadn’t destroyed her body.

She was sitting up on a thin bunk with scratchy white sheets in a room with white metal walls. It smelled like JP-5 and salt and industrial cleanser. Under the thin sheet she was wearing an oversized men’s shirt, her preferred sleepwear.

But...it wasn’t a hospital. After what had just happened why...what? She was uninjured.

A yellow dress hung from a hook on the wall.

There was a banging...again? Had it happened before while she was spaced out?

The door to the stateroom crashed open, slamming against the opposite wall. A tall, handsome man in slacks and a white button-down slid into the room. He had a short-nosed black gun out, pointed down in a ready position just behind his leg. His eyes scanned the corners, sweeping for threats.

“Kaji?” Asuka’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

He breathed in slowly and the gun disappeared like magic, so fast she almost doubted it had ever been there. A steady hand ran through his hair, emphasizing how casually cool and handsome he was.

“Just a bad dream, princess?”

Asuka’s hands clenched in the sheets. It was all so clear. NERV had been attacked. She’d lost her battle against the production evas. Where was she now?

No, wait—she’d read about this.

Total sensory replacement. An interrogation technique for enemy agents using full virtual reality—a system similar to the eva’s cockpit interface. But instead of being integrated via the LCL solution and cortical interfaces (hers appeared to be sitting on her duffle at the foot of the bunk) this advanced military hardware would be plugged directly into her visual cortex—usually by invasive, involuntary surgery.

It wasn’t real. None of this was. It was just her own memories of Kaji being used against her.

“Uh, you okay honey?”

Teeth grinding, Asuka took several deep breaths before replying. “ _Soryu, Asuka Langley._ NERV pilot Unit-02 _._ Tango _zwei zwei null null null eins zwei neun. Dezember vier, zweitausend ein._ ”

Kaji looked stunned for a second before his casually charming grin took over again. It was a rather good fake. Maybe they had tortured him too and gotten this data. She hadn’t seen him in how long...

“Asuka, this isn’t funny.” Stern now, the form of Kaji stepped over to her and grabbed her arm, shaking her. “What’s going on? Did something happen?”

“ _ **Soryu** , Asuka Langley. _NERV **pilot** Unit-02 _._ **Tango** zwei zwei null null null eins zwei neun. **Dezember** vier, zweitausend ein!”

“Asuka! Asuka snap out of it. Here, get dressed and we’ll grab some breakfast.”

She stood there as Kaji’s form took the dress and offered it to her. He dropped it on the bed after a minute.

“Asuka, this isn’t funny. I thought you were a professional. This is just childish and I’m not impressed. Asuka!”

She didn’t resist as he continued shouting, then she felt herself being pulled to her feet, the yellow dress ignored as it fell crumpled to the deck plates. She just stood there as her failure really sunk in. She’d failed to kill all the production units like Misato had asked. NERV was doomed. Everyone was probably captured and being tortured like her. Hopefully they were dead.

That tight, disembodied feeling she’d floated in for days and days was returning. Good. She didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to feel this.

Eyes glassy and dull, she didn’t resist as the form of Kaji dragged her out the door and down white painted metal halls. He pushed her through tight, narrow doorways. They passed a wide-eyed sailor. Male. American or British. Uniform...American UN navy uniform. Odd.

Why put her in a ship in this scenario? Using the image of Kaji was obvious if they knew her history. They were clearly going for a soft approach. No real pain yet. No questions. Even Kaji’s grip on her arm only hurt a little.

Asuka was on another bed. Someone had changed her into one of those terrible hospital gowns. A female nurse? She didn’t remember. Someone dressed in medical scrubs was shown talking to the form of Kaji on the other side of a thin curtain. She hoped Kaji was dead. This was going to get bad soon. She’d read about this. Special forces at Third Branch had told her stories about their training, trying to scare the too-smart little girl with a college degree doing big boy military training.

Her, scared? As if. The one thing that stuck with her had been that everyone eventually broke under torture. Did anything their captors wanted. Told any lies they thought would make it stop. Promised anything for a moment’s peace. It was just how long you lasted.

Fuck them. They’d have to kill her. Again.

Hours must have passed. Someone had given her some water a while back from a squeeze bottle with a nipple. Left some food. Breakfast? Lunch? Didn’t matter. She’d accepted the water without thinking. Didn’t matter. This wasn’t her body. It was a VR sim. A torture room for her mind. They were feeding her broken body through a tube or maybe intravenously as she was strapped into some horrible machine that was stuck into her brain. None of this was real. Tears dripped down her cheeks as she curled up in a ball on the hospital bed.

Just when she’d figured it out they’d killed her. She’d had her eva. Her Unit-02. She hadn’t been strong enough. She didn’t want to die. Her protector was gone again. She was going to die. First, pain until she couldn’t resist. Then she’d die.

Asuka’s mouth barely moved in a whisper. “Mama.”

The ship was pitching oddly. Alarms had been ringing for a while now. Bone-shaking booms. Battleship guns? What was the point in this? Everything fell, and she fell, and there was water and screams, people were screaming, but she wasn’t.

She didn’t want to die. Mama wouldn’t let her die again. A wall of white painted metal turned into the ground and a sudden stop that shattered her.

* * *

Asuka opened her eyes. She was lying on a thin bunk with scratchy white sheets in a room with white metal walls. It smelled like JP-5 and salt and industrial cleanser. She was wearing an oversized men’s shirt. A yellow dress hung from a hook on the wall.

She lay there unmoving, just staring at the white paint on the ceiling for a long time. Banging. The door was unlocked from the outside. More talking. Then she was in the medical bay again on a hospital bed. This time, there was an IV in her arm. And she was strapped down on the bed.

Time dragged on endlessly. Then the shaking once again and loud sounds and screaming. Daylight. She turned her head and stared. Then the screech of metal and water and-

* * *

Asuka opened her eyes. She was lying on a thin bunk with scratchy white sheets in a room with white metal walls. It smelled like JP-5 and salt and industrial cleanser. She was wearing an oversized men’s shirt. A yellow dress hung from a hook on the wall.

What. Was this. The point of VR interrogation was to keep someone in a familiar environment. Use images of their friends and enemies to break their will or confuse them. Wipe their short-term memory over and over again to find a combination that made them compliant.

But again gone was the ship’s medical bay. Gone was the huge hole in the ship and the giant eye looking at her. But she remembered everything about that confusing experience. It had been an angel attack. Why put that in the VR simulation instead of torturing her?

There were other options. Mental contamination. Literally dissolving into the LCL. She’d snuck a look at the reports by hacking a medical terminal when no one was looking. Shinji had some weird shit happen to him, apparently, and that was just what he’d said to the medical staff before clamming up like usual. The fucking pervert.

Was that what had happened to her? Was she melted into goo and this was all part of a giant hallucination? Were these the last dying firings of her synapses as her mind dissolved into the eva’s consciousness buffer, her sense of self being lost even now from diving too deep and too fast into a severely damaged combat cyborg’s neural pathways?

Fuck it.

Asuka stood. She reached out to the yellow dress with a frown. Ten minutes later, dressed and ready for whatever the fuck was going on, she walked down the corridors to the ship’s mess. She was on what appeared to be UN-CVN-075, now called the “Over the Rainbow,” part of the UN Pacific fleet.

She ate the eggs, bacon, and toast mechanically, sitting by herself in the almost empty mess. Carriers used their large size to be significantly less cramped than other ships, making things like this the envy of other sailors. The food was hot and filling, about as good as you could get in the military.

This was a simulation of late summer 2015. She had been heading from Third Branch of NERV in Germany, stopping off for weapons tests and fittings in the US, then sailing across the Pacific ocean with the last great old ships of war humanity had to reach their destination in Tokyo-3 where the final war was already in progress. Thirty missile frigates and destroyers, five aircraft carriers, four battleships, and three huge cargo ships. Unit-02 was on one of those, the _Othello_.

Misato was arriving from the mainland on a heavy transport helicopter with Unit-02’s specialized power plug system from an outlying Japanese military base. Together, the set would be delivered to NERV headquarters.

But it wasn’t just Misato. It was Shinji and his stupid friends. They were landing here on the flagship in an hour and a half. What the fuck was going on. Her fingers gripped the edge of the table, knuckles pale.

Kaji sat down next to her and ruffled her hair. She frowned, automatically checking to make sure her red triangular interface pods hadn’t been disturbed.

“What, no peppy hello this morning Asuka?”

She frowned. Why not.

“I’m trying to be more professional, Kaji.”

“Ah. Putting on your game face for the other pilots. I understand. Looking to be the queen bee of the base again.”

“Yeah, I’m the one with actual training,” Asuka said, policing up her dishes by long habit and dumping them on the collection cart. “They need to know I’m the one who knows what I’m doing.”

Stomping out of the mess she didn’t see Kaji’s long, calculating look.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note:** Inspired by the re-release of Evangelion I've made a thing. Mostly canon from _NGE_ and _End of Evangelion_. I've got plans for a few elements from _Rebuild_ and there are obviously time loop elements at play. Should be about 20k words long in about 15 chapters based on my outline. I'm looking at three future sequels of increasing insanity at about the same length if things work out.


	2. Some say in ice

**Holding onto Something  
**by TimeLoopedPowerGamer

Disclaimer: NGE doesn’t belong to me.

* * *

Asuka’s clenched hands held the hem of her yellow dress down against the wind blowing across the carrier’s flight deck. It was just like she had remembered. Maybe this wasn’t some nightmare to taunt her. Kaji wasn’t asking her for the secrets of NERV. Shenji just looked like some scared kid. His stupid friends looked as stupid as she remembered.

Introductions. It didn’t matter. She ignored everyone, just following and staring into the middle distance. But Asuka didn’t miss the long glances from Kaji and Misato, the way the captain squinted at her, the two adults’ hushed whispers outside in the mess hall before they took an informal tea time.

Excusing herself then leaving without caring to wait for a reply, Asuka made her way via a passenger ferry boat hop over to the cargo ship Othello. No one stopped her, of course.

Standing in front of the giant red form of Unit-02 was so strange. It lay silent in the partially LCL-filled cargo container on its chest, armored face turned towards her. Standing on the floating pontoons next to it she could almost feel normal. Wearing her plug suit felt normal. Sitting in the pilot seat felt normal. This would be her test. A quantum-paired neural synchronization event wasn’t something that could be faked. So she’d be back in her stateroom or black out or some excuse would come up, anything to prevent her from merging again with her m-, with Unit-02.

“Asuka, what are you doing?” Misato’s voice came over Unit-02’s comms. Audio only. She must have integrated the carrier’s naval radio with NERV standard wireless channels. Took her long enough.

Comms now ran off a trickle charge battery currently plugged into the cargo container’s supply. A completely different order of magnitude to the power requirements to get the giant eva to move so she left it on. Less than five minutes to get to the cable at full power usage. If the simulation or whatever even let her get close to doing so.

“I am preparing Unit-02 for combat,” Asuka said, her voice lifeless.

The silence stretched on for quite a while. Misato’s voice came back again, unnaturally calm. “Why do you think there’s going to be combat, Asuka?”

“Because the angel is almost here. Designation _6th Angel, Gaghiel_.”

The channel was still open. She could almost picture Misato sitting there with the transmit button held down.

“Wha the hell is that brat talking about?” The captain’s voice this time with some other faint chatter from the bridge crew.

The line went silent as Asuka continued to work through the formal checklist. She didn’t want any excuses. _They_ would have to break the simulation.

Misato’s voice again. “Asuka! Escort sub _Cymbeline_ isn’t responding. Assume enemy contact. We’re going to power Unit-02 from the carrier umbilical. We’ll cover you with the fleet but you need to make it over on internal battery power yourself. Only the eva can destroy an angel!”

Asuka’s hands continued to move through the long memorized startup procedure. “Copy that Major Misato. Reach the plug on the carrier. Attach umbilical. Then initiate combat with hostile.”

“Uh, its captain, Asuka. Right. So. Remember, you are on B-type equipment. You don’t have-”

“I know Captain. No underwater combat equipment available. I’ll be fine.”

Good attention to detail. Misato had been promoted next month, after the fight with _Sahaquiel_. Her uniform had been correct in this simulation but it would have been easy to slip up on that. But it was just as easy to check this way.

Silence again. “Good luck Asuka.”

She’d done this before. Fought this fight. She could do this again. It didn’t matter what was happening. She’d do it even better without Shinji’s fumbling.

Then the alarms started when Asuka was almost all the way through the startup sequence. She finished without pausing until LCL filled the cockpit.

Misato’s voice echoed her actions. “A-10 nerve connection nominal. Language is set to German.”

A buzz in Asuka’s brain.

“Bi-directional circuits are open. Initialization completed. Sync ratio... _eighty-nine percent over standard activation_?” Misato practically screamed the last part, but Asuka didn’t listen.

“No, you don’t understand. Kaji! I can’t turn it down with these controls! If she goes over one hundred percent, it could-”

Asuka was back. Connected to her eva again. Connected to her mother. No one could fake this. Her eyes were slits as a cool breeze blew across her soul and ghostly arms encircled her.

Unit-02 burst out of the cargo container as the first of many destroyers exploded. The shock wave hammered the Othello but Asuka leaped off of it, bouncing from ship to ship to get to the main fleet carrier _Over the Rainbow_. Ignoring the damage she was doing as well as the wake from the angel off in the distance, Asuka focused on her objective: the power plug still being hauled into place on the flat top of the carrier. It was already connected to the nuclear power plant in the old ship’s hull.

Asuka reached the carrier with a last mighty leap, tipping it over, knocking some of the last of the UN navy’s expensive airplanes into the sea. Avoid the hanger elevator...there. She plugged in, stopping the countdown with over three minutes to spare.

“Switchover complete.”

Progressive knife out. It twitched slightly in a self-diagnostic before stilling again. Then she waited. There, a wake heading towards a battleship. Range was good. Two jumps. She leapt off the carrier, leaving it rocking behind her. She caromed off a frigate, dragging her cable line behind her, and landed in the explosion of the doomed battleship’s remains. Her hands were claws covered in her own AT field, gripping into the huge manta-like body of the angel as she was dragged underwater.

Misato’s voice again on the comms. “Asuka! Hold on! We’ll figure out-”

It didn’t matter. Asuka’s knife was still in her hand, cutting edge sharpened by her mind and will and hypersonic vibrations, and she was cutting and cutting and wet flesh parted up to her elbows, then a roar, her roar. The angel tried to drag her across the seabed, tried to scrape her off on the sunken buildings of some city lost fifteen years ago, but her hands just dug further into the not-flesh and dug and dug and dug. A hard, red crystal and she tasted blood in her mouth and her knife was _stabbing and stabbing and stabbing_.

“Asu- -out of c- -erserk!

Red crystal cracked in her hands like glass and Asuka’s heart sang.

* * *

Misato’s voice over open comms. “Tow her back! Lock the wench at 10 meters! Full to stern! Maximum power to the wench!”

Unit-02’s hand appeared over the side of the carrier, gripping the cable and dragging the giant combat cyborg over the edge of the ship. It crouched there dangerously, coiled like a predator.

“Okay. Asuka? Asuka honey. Mission complete. Begin shutdown sequence three-alfa-two now.”

A long pause, then the giant form hunched forward against the deck onto its elbows, lifeless again as the light in its eyes dimmed.

* * *

Misato’s hands clutched the clipboard too tight. “...so until we figure out what happened out there, how you knew the angel was coming and how you achieved...whatever that was...Asuka, it could be bad. Your sync ratio was way above your previous activation tests. Mental contamination is a real danger here.”

“But you haven’t found anything yet? It’s been over a week.” Asuka asked, arms wrapped around her knees as she hunched on the hospital bed.

“No, Asuka. No signs of mental contamination so far. Look. This is just for a few more days. Be patient a little while longer. Then you’ll be right back to piloting Unit-02 again, okay? Take it easy.” Misato tried to smile at her. It didn’t reach her eyes. She was afraid. “That’s an order.”

Alarms blared. All the displays in the medical center changed to the warning. Security condition yellow, level one emergency.

“Shit!” Misato hissed, then looked at Asuka again. Her eyes shied away immediately. “Stay here, honey. We’ll take care of this.”

Captain Misato ran out, leaving Asuka with the nameless female nurse, sitting on a hospital bed in a gown again. Asuka frowned. This was different. Piloting Unit-02 felt so real. Was it? Did that mean she wasn’t in some artificial scenario? It seemed people would react differently than she remembered. Did that mean she could change things?

The day dragged on as Asuka lay there, under the scientific microscope of NERV medical. They must have sortied by now with Shinji and Rei. That was different. If this was reality. If this really was a second...more than a second chance. Another second chance every time she died. Maybe mother really was protecting her. Did that mean...could she-

* * *

Asuka opened her eyes. She was lying on a thin bunk with scratchy white sheets in a room with white metal walls. It smelled like JP-5 and salt and industrial cleanser. She was wearing an oversized men’s shirt. A yellow dress hung from a hook on the wall.

What? Sitting up Asuka frowned. The angel shouldn’t have been anywhere near NERV. How could she have just suddenly died? Why was she back here again?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note:** I think the poem lines as chapter titles are pretentious enough for the mid-nineties. Trying to keep the tone consistent with the source material!


End file.
